On Monday a certain very senior Broadcast Producer walked up to my desk and told me that Fallon had won the Chrylser account. I laughed it off, to be honest. Well, I laughed it off after checking Agency Spy.

Then in the shower on Tuesday morning I commented to the pre-wife, who was puttering around the bathrooom getting ready for work, that I had heard above rumor…and we got a little bit excited because, goddamn it, there is nothing like a big account win to turn these dark economic times into times of excessive celebration.

And I haven’t been drunk in a while.

Then this afternoon while I was sitting on a painful creative call, Facebook lit up. And when that happens you just know the rumor you have resisted talking about is true. 1,000 ad types can’t be wrong. Right?

So I am heading out of the office to find some other advertising-loving Minneapolitans to celebrate some good news for the city’s industry and to handicap our own hopes that we might get requested for a money-spinning gig with the shop’s now-biggest client.

It’s not masochism, but for some reason I like to read the consumer complaints that come through the business of one of the clients that I work on. Man’s capacity for unbridled emotion over trivialities fascinates me.

So I was even more fascinated today when I found that the President of the Official Agency of Biz had been called by a consumer who was angry about the performance of one of the products made by one of our clients. This was not about the advertising. They were upset about product efficacy. Our ads do not make efficacy claims. This guy was just pissed that the product sucked.

He did like the ads though, based on what I heard about the conversation he had with our president, which might explain why he thought to call the ad agency. Or something.

It’s like being unhappy with the quality of your local parish priest’s sermon and showing your displeasure by punching Jesus in the face.

It seems like every time I am in a briefing where a planner tells the team that we have to be careful not to underestimate the consumer, I go back to my desk and happen upon an article like this. And then I laugh to myself. Because it is impossible to underestimate the consumer.

Let’s break this down:

“It’s true. You can get paid to drive your own car – whether to work, to church, to your kids’ soccer games or any of your other normal destinations.”

All you have to do is send $24.99 and we will send you the brochure and DVD that tell you how! So call now.

“You won’t get rich doing this mind you, but in these recessionary times, taking in an extra $300 to $900 a month can definitely come in handy for a lot of folks.”

Of all of the complications of an intra-office romance, the last one that I expected was this. I should have known better. This was not just any intra-office romance, this was an ad agency intra-office romance. Layoffs are a way of life at ad agencies, especially when the economy falters as ours has. I should have known better.

The relationship, which was already strained, did not recover. The emotional hardship of being laid off is difficult enough, but to be dating and have to see and talk to a person still employed at the agency that laid you off (and to have your social life centered there, as so many ad people’s is)…well, that can get to be a lot. For anyone.

And it did.

Although the worst part was the senior partner walking up to me to apologize profusely for not telling me first, being more sensitive, etc.

What was I supposed to say?

So I just let it happen and wished that the whole situation would go away. And not just because the relationship was on the rocks, but because the relationship should never have been a concern of the senior partner to begin with.

It was a bad situation. And with that, I learned my lesson: no more intra-office relationships, no matter how pretty the AE.

People who use social media to connect to brands need real friends. As in, people friends.

Because only with actual people friends can a person have a conversation, and conversation is truly the most civilizing of inter-personal interactions.

In lieu of being able to change the current social dynamic in this country and connect all of those souls who have friended brands on Facebook, set brand logos as their IM icon or whose Tweets are like a corporate news RSS feed, I will bemoan it. There are people out there like that. But they are weird. And other people know that they are weird. Which makes them less trustworthy.

Think about it for a second (…thinking…). Who do you go to for an opinion when you are thinking about making a purchase in a category you are unfamiliar with? Family likely. A knowledgeable friend. Third-part expert sources.

You’re not checking Facebook to see if a brand you are considering has a lot of friends. Twitter neither.

Frankly, as much as traditional advertising cannot save a bad product, neither can social media or influencer outreach or brand advocate conversion efforts.

Because you can’t hide on the internet, and a bad product will kill you every time.

That is not to say that people who have had a good experience with your company, product, etc can’t help you – obviously they can. But they are reacting to a positive experience with the product, service, company, etc and therefore the primary way to create advocates is not to invest heavily in social media but to invest heavily in developing an effective and user-friendly product, service, company, etc.

That is not to say that outreach in social and other channels aren’t great ways to amplify what people who love you are saying. They are.

It’s just that you don’t have to do anything beyond create the product, service or company that people love. The rest takes care of itself, social media strategy or not.

Social media is just conversation in binary code. And like regular conversation among regular people, people don’t want a brand to help them along or get in the way. They will talk about it if it makes sense. But they will get annoyed if they find that a brand is trying to orchestrate the whole thing.

People don’t want to get sold, and certainly not under the disingenuous guise of ‘conversation.’

So let it happen naturally. The way to create advocates for your brand is to create an fucking awesome product or experience because, since you can’t hide on the internet, if you have nothing to hide that people will find out about it.